Now this is something that I find really interesting. We all know and love Google Chrome/Chromium (and if you don't, you're demonstrably wrong), but Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the "http://". This made a lot of people very upset.

I’m amazed it has stuck around so long. It’s an under-the-hood thing that has zero tangible quality to end users. It still annoys me massively that some sites require you to include the “http://” if you are giving a website address—it’s insane; how are end-users supposed to remember that garglemesh?

I don’t think an icon is a solution either. http:// doesn’t /represent/ anything. It is the absence of encryption; at best. There are too many icons already in the browser and it would only serve to clutter the UI.

The confusion with http:// and whether "www" is needed or not is so bad that advertisers have started to say “search online for ‘x’” instead of giving an actual web address.

I’m amazed it has stuck around so long. It’s an under-the-hood thing that has zero tangible quality to end users. It still annoys me massively that some sites require you to include the “http://” if you are giving a website address—it’s insane; how are end-users supposed to remember that garglemesh?

The http:// comes in handy when link-ifying arbitrary data. And, obviously, when trying to link to an https login page because some site offers both.

And, I suppose, they shouldn't remember it, should they? Instead they should copy/paste or drag/drop it. That's what I do.

I don’t think an icon is a solution either. http:// doesn’t /represent/ anything. It is the absence of encryption; at best. There are too many icons already in the browser and it would only serve to clutter the UI.

That chunk of text represents the scheme / protocol used. Except when it doesn't. In Chrome/Chromium dev builds. (And apparently some mobile browsers, where it hides it from view unless you tap into it)

The confusion with http:// and whether "www" is needed or not is so bad that advertisers have started to say “search online for ‘x’” instead of giving an actual web address.

My mother will type www.google [enter]. Users are all over the place when it comes to something you have to typed. Guess what though? Not all sites require the www. Try to go to http://www.slashdot.org and see where it takes you. So the sites themselves can get rid of www from their ads if they want, except, of course, that it helps things look like an address to a web site.

I guess there's a silver lining though -- Maybe I'll hear fewer instances of backslash which should be slash. I genuinely wonder where that confusion came from. My first thoughts are the DOS/Windows path separators are to blame, but maybe it has nothing to do with that. Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/727/

But what about the sites that have different routing rules depending on a protocol? IIRC, OpenBSD site used to route You to WWW content when was asked as http://[www/ftp].openbsd.org and to FTP content when asked as ftp://[www/ftp].openbsd.org.

The confusion with http:// and whether "www" is needed or not is so bad that advertisers have started to say “search online for ‘x’” instead of giving an actual web address.

Really? I haven't heard that since AOL's keyword days. Where you'd see on packaging: AOL keyword "pepsi". Which Aol did both because they thought the http:// and www were too confusing as well as trying to fool people into thinking that aol was the internet and prevent them from easily switching over to other isp.

Could you provide an example from the past 5-6 years of some one just saying search for "x"?

The easiest thing to do as a website is to redirect www.example.com to http://example.com or visa versa. No user intervention required, nor any explanation. Its 2010, everyone has already figured out their own coping mechanisim for it.

Which, sadly, includes my coworker's wife opening up IE which defaults to bing, then searching for google, then entering in a web address( including www, so www.cnn.com for example) in the search bar and then clicking on it.) Changing chrome's address bar behaviour is not going to fix that mess.

Could you provide an example from the past 5-6 years of some one just saying search for "x"?

This has become very common in advertising in Japan in the past few years, to the point that it's probably more popular now than showing a URL. The world is a bigger place than [insert country name] :-).